Andrew O'Hagan's Brilliant "The Tower"

For me, one of this year’s literary highlights is Andrew O’Hagan’s “The Tower” (London Review of Books, June 7, 2018), a massive report on the Grenfell Tower fire that killed seventy-two people. O’Hagan is a superb writer. His The Atlantic Ocean (2013) is one of my favorite essay collections. His The Secret Life (2017) was one of the best books of 2017. His “Imaginary Spaces” (The New Yorker, March 28, 2016) was one of the best New Yorker pieces of 2016 (see here).

“The Tower” has a fascinating dialectical structure, evincing a deep distrust of simplistic black-and-white narrative.

Divided into seven sections, it describes what happened, sketches the lives of some of the victims and survivors, considers various causes of the disaster, meets with activists, attends the memorial service for the victims, covers the rabid finger-pointing, political fallout, and scapegoating of the council that owned the tower – all the while weaving its own compelling narrative around “the complications of truth.” O’Hagan writes,

In an effort to politicise this, activists and media observers, both engaged on a prolonged mission to simplify, speak of the council as if it were the only organisation involved, and speak of the ‘cladding’ as if it were the only issue. Yet, of all the organisations, the council was the only one happy to spend (rather than to make) money. It was the least involved in nuts and bolts decisions about the refurbishment, as we have seen, and all the big decisions came quite appropriately from the TMO, which commissioned the project; from Rydon, the builders; from Artelia UK, the project managers; from Studio E Architects, the principal designers; and IBI Group, which acted as planning consultants. These organisations between them made the tower what it became in the early hours of 14 June, when fire escaped from a kitchen and was funnelled rapidly upwards through the wide cavities and across the unstopped boundaries between the flats, combusting the Celotex insulation which in turn combusted the Reynobond aluminium panels. (The insulation was made by Saint Gobain UK and the panels were made by Arconic.) This pile of names will no doubt irritate the simplifiers during the several years it takes for the inquiry to provide an answer. But their existence supplies us with one answer now: the tower’s vulnerability lay in a network of negligence that was beyond the capacity of any one man, and beyond the failings of any one material. Some truths are just too long to put in a headline.

He says of the media,

And journalism, hour by hour and day by day, showed by its feasting on half-baked items that it had lost the power to treat reality fairly. You saw it everywhere. Channel 4 News, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, Sky News, the New York Times: from the middle of that night, they began to turn the fire into the story they wanted it to be. Reality wasn’t good enough, the tragedy wasn’t bad enough, it had to be augmented, it had to be blown up, facts couldn’t be gleaned quickly enough, and stories went without investigation, research, tact or even checking. In a world of perpetual commentary in which everyone and anyone is allowed their own facts, accusation stands as evidence.

O’Hagan’s “The Tower” is one of the most damning indictments of rushing to judgment I’ve ever read.